Real Estate Reality

Inspiration

As a woman moving to a new city for an internship and future career, safety is my absolute top priority when searching for a place to stay. Knowing that Rose Hack is a woman-centric event, I wanted to address one of our most universal concerns: feeling secure in our own homes, whether we are living there permanently or just for a summer. So, I pitched the idea of our project to my team! They also thought it was a great idea. Our problem statement was that there is a major "information gap" in the real estate market. While certain property listing websites provide excellent price and property data, it lacks localized safety, emergency service, lifestyle metrics, and the real return on investment of the property. This creates an inefficient and potentially risky search process where users must hunt for fragmented data across the web. To solve this, we focused on Zillow, the most widely used property listing website, and we believe our extension truly elevates that experience. It provides critical safety and lifestyle metrics that standard listings miss, empowering users to find a home where they can actually feel at peace.

What it does

Real Estate Reality is a browser extension designed to transform standard Zillow browsing into a high-powered investment analysis experience. The tool automatically scans search results and property pages to extract data, calculating potential Return on Investment (ROI) by comparing purchase prices with scraped rent estimates. It evaluates every listing across six critical metrics—including safety (crime grades, emergency service proximity, environmental hazards) and convenience (nearby shops, gyms, and cafes)—to provide a comprehensive property score. Users can instantly pivot their search focus using a dual-mode toggle: "Safety & Lifestyle" mode prioritizes neighborhood quality, while "ROI Investment" mode shifts the math to highlight the best financial yields. Top-tier properties are visually highlighted, and detailed reports featuring animated gauges and investment insights are injected directly into the Zillow interface for seamless decision-making.

How we built it

We built this solution using a modular architecture that balances client-side agility with robust backend computation. The frontend is a Chrome extension developed with React, TypeScript, and Vite, utilizing a vanilla JavaScript content script to manipulate the Zillow DOM and inject our custom UI components. To power our scoring engine, we developed a Python FastAPI backend that aggregates data from diverse sources, including the Nominatim API for geocoding and the Overpass API for proximity mapping. Our complex scoring algorithms utilize the Haversine formula for precise distance calculations and normalization functions to scale data like CrimeGrade letter grades and environmental wellness factors (fire hazards and AQI) into a unified 0–100 scale. By combining real-time web scraping via Playwright with efficient local caching and RESTful integration, we created a tool that provides professional-grade property analytics without ever leaving the Zillow platform.

Challenges we ran into

Since this was our first time creating a web extension, we faced a steep learning curve. We originally had big dreams of making it work on every property website and including dozens of different features. However, we quickly had to learn how to manage our scale and focus on what was actually possible within our competition tracks. The biggest technical hurdle was speed. Analyzing every single property one by one was taking way too long. We had to learn how to think efficiently by optimizing our API calls, using multithreading to handle multiple tasks at once, and streamlining our data analysis to make the extension fast and smooth.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud to have built our very first web extension that is not only functional but genuinely useful. Knowing that this data-driven tool can help a diverse range of people find safer, better homes makes this success at Rose Hack even more meaningful. One of our biggest wins was massively shortening the runtime; turning a slow analysis into a fast, smooth experience was a huge challenge we overcame. Plus, our team’s CI/CD workflow was so solid that we managed to avoid "insane" merge conflicts—which, in the world of hackathons, is an accomplishment in and of itself!

What we learned

We learned how to build Chrome web extensions. None of us had worked with browser extensions before, and we were surprised by how powerful they are—especially their ability to directly manipulate the DOM of existing websites. We also learned how impactful multithreading can be. By parallelizing our work, we were able to reduce runtimes from over two minutes to under one minute, significantly improving performance and user experience.

What's next for Real Estate Reality

While our scores for safety, convenience, and ROI are accurate, after doing more research, we would be able to provide users with more accurate data. Additionally, we plan on expanding our extension to work with countries outside of the United States